i had been anticipating vang vieng since i left vancouver. it seemed like a rite of passage for SE asia backpackers. anyone who i talked to about SE asia: "make sure you hit up tubing! it's THE SHIIIIIT!"
landon, johan and i arrived on an overcast day and met up with sean and jessica who were traveling a day ahead of us. we opened the night at babylon, a restaurant owned by a ladyboy. we chose babylon for it's free wifi... well, that and it refused to play 'friends'.
about that... vang vieng is kind of a one road tourist town for the most part. and lined all along the main road are 'TV bars'. you can't walk by any of them without hearing that awful laugh track that thankfully died with the 90's. the laugh track belongs to 'friends' mostly. otherwise, you're likely going to be seeing 'southpark' or 'the simpsons'. 'southpark' i can deal with but 'friends' is inexcusable. "chandler, that shirt is to big!" *fake laughter*
it's terrible to be walking down the street with amazing natural beauty all around you and you see these assholes zombified to 'friends' all day. did i ever tell you that i hate 'friends'? i tried to avoid it, but once fell prey during a pizza craving.
anyways, we all agreed to go to this place called bucket bar after babylon. it was what they call a 'gong show', with drunk tourists drinking cheap ass rice whiskey and beerlao. a whiskey bucket was 20,000kip while my preferred vodka bucket rung in at a ridiculous 50,000kip. whiskey is made locally so it's real cheap. in fact, i saw some american and a brit buying bottle after bottle of straight up whiskey and just doing shooters all night. that's about $3 for a 26oz approx. btw... real cheap. i don't envy their next morning... i ended up bumping into my english friends from luang prabang by the end of the night and johan and i finished the evening drinking with them.
if memory serves me well, the next morning was our plan to go tubing. you find this garage in town where the lao people have set upa table where you sign something and they hand you an inflated innertube from the piles behind them and stuff you on a tuk tuk with a load of other people. they drive you about 10 mins out of town along the river and dump you at the insanely loud bar. the music is actually painfully loud, and terrible if i made say so. but everyone seems to love it... there are some lunatics there who 'represent' by writing slogans or whatever else on their bodies with a jiffy marker. a common one is letting everyone know how manydays straight they've been tubing. i see some that say well over 100 days. alright.... another was "i fucked the olson twins before they were famous". i believe i have photo proof of this one. anyways, trashy tourists, loud music, beerlao, sunshine and....... (my favourite) the swing. looks dangerous! ok, you climb a tree where they've set up a platform where you take hold of the bar and swing off over the river that lays below this bar. it's kind of scary because it's low season. the water isn't that deep in certain places. i wanted to try it out but no one else would with me so i chickened out. other people were doing it plenty, and even doing triple flips and all kinds of fancy moves. we just jumped in our tubes and went along. there appeared to be plenty more bars that seemed way less popular along the river... this seemed more appealing to us. you just float along and lao people throw out water bottles attached to ropes that you grab onto and pull you in to their bars. the first bar we stopped at also had a swing. in fact most of them do. we picked up some beerlao here and i decided to check out this swing. it was pretty awesome... exhilerating. however, tall guy that i am, my feet touched the riverbed. it ALMOST hurt. i think if i was a bit taller or the water was a little lower, it could have sucked ass. i don't think anyone else did the swing except me out of our group. we carried along until we found a bar with a zip line instead of a swing. the girls were more down with this one so we stopped. you don't swing you just let gravity take you. there is an end to the line though and if you're still gripping the handles when you hit it, you will go flying whether you like it or not. i saw this from the people who went before me. i went and let go a little early and my feet hit the ground and again, and i suffered a minor cut on my toe. no big deal. then after another beerlao, johan, landon and jessica decided to go. johan went first and held on until the end of the line and did a spectacular double fliptype thing and it brought out 'wows' and whoas' from the watchers. next up landon went, her body hanging limp and screaming. it was real fun to see her do this kind of thing. i forgot to mention she did the rope swing at the waterfalls in luang prabang aswell. i have her doing the zip line on video, which i should upload to facebook sometime. after went jess, but as she was going johan was emerging from the water complaining about his shoulder. he looked as if he was experiencing alot of pain. clearly nothing broken, though he thought so. we told him he'd know it if it was broken. after alot of consideration he decided to go to the hospital instead of carrying on. this was unfortunate and we all felt bad that we got to keep going. well, we did.
next up was the giant slide.
skipped it because you needed to buy a drink to use it and we bought too many at the other bars. we just tubed on from there. no mare bars... the further we got though, the more shallow it got until it got pretty uncomfortable. uncomfortable as in, rocks grazing your ass. lame. we had to get the tubes back before 6pm or we lost our deposit on them, so we got off the river before the end and just took a tuk tuk back into town. did i mention that johan left his tube behind? that also sucks for him. when we did get back to town we bumped in johan with his brand new arm sling. turns out he just traumitized the muscle and the doctors orders were to "drink beer". oh, laos. tasty pizza and beer later, we crashed for the night after a long day.
next day johan, landon and i ventured out to find a cave and some blue lagoon. we walked 2 km across a massive field (with the sun beating down on us, heavily) and our shirts were sticking to our bodies. we followed the signs to the cave and the lagoon but we only found a crappy small cave and a mountain, so we climbed it instead. not anticipating a mountain as we were only wearing flip flops. ugh... it was easy enough though, and the panoramic view was spectacular. i have a video of that too. after a few poses with the flag atop the mountain, we went back down and headed back into town and took a dip in the river to cool off. that evening we went out of town to visit sean and jessica at the organic farm they were staying at. tons of conversation later we went to a local bar after sean and jessica went to bed so they could get good sleep before their trip to vientianne the next day. the local bar was really dark and had terrible music at a really high volume. over priced beer lao to boot. and this is a bar for the locals? they're poor... did we get the special tourist price? we left when the DJ was playing that really annoying akon song and started rapping over it in lao.
just.... just terrible. we went bar hopping and found bucket bar again because it was the only bar that was still kicking. bumped into the brits again and then went home. next day we went tubing again. this time i tried the crazy swing at the first bar and for once did NOT touch the river floor. this swing was intense. also this time around we jumped in a mud pit and i tried the big slide. the big slide was also scary at first but you actual get alot of distance on it. have a video of this too. not much else happening here, lazing along the river same as before until it got shallow and we said screw it. the night was relaxed. i felt kind of shitty so it was another crazy night at bucket bar with me just sitting there. after 2 beers i couldn't stand it anymore and went home. i think that was the end of vang vieng. good riddance, 'friends'. next up: vientianne.
